They drop through the gully, one after another, kicking pebbles and occasionally big rocks down toward the Pack members below them. Every now and then, somebody shouts, “ROCK!” and everyone has to duck as far off the trail as possible as a freaking boulder comes hurtling from on high, threatening to knock out or decapitate anyone in its path.

Miraculously, nobody gets hurt.

At the bottom of the gully, the mountain widens out to a broad, flatter shoulder, on which Dawn sees some lichen and a couple of cairns. This is obviously the way they should have gone: no chimneys, no ledges, no batshit traverses. They’re still a long way from the bottom, but the really scary part is over.

The Pack hurries across the shoulder to the top of another gully. This one has a dry streambed cutting through the middle of it, all the way down to the tarn. It’s not as steep as the gully above, and there are plants and the odd stunted tree. Still, it’s easy to get careless, as Dawn discovers. She falls on a loose patch of earth and nearly takes out Lucas’s legs ahead of her, probably almost killing them both. But Lucas stays upright and somehow arrests her slide. Looks back at her and grins, wearily, like Ain’t this some shit.

And Dawn can’t do much but shake her head in return.

This is hell.

“Come on,” Lucas tells Dawn. “We gotta get down there before the weather turns.”

He’s not lying. It’s probably about four in the afternoon at this point, which means it shouldn’t be dark for another three hours, but already the skies are getting gloomier. To the west, Dawn can see storm clouds forming, rolling in over the distant peaks, getting closer. There’s bad weather coming, and it’s going to fuck up their day.

And if it storms too bad, Dawn thinks, they might not even be able to bring in a helicopter.

Dawn remembers what Amber said about the last weather report. We might see some rain, but we’ll be down off the summit by then.

It doesn’t feel like rain, though, the way the wind’s biting, chilling Dawn through her jacket and numbing her face. Not at this time of year. Not this high in the mountains.

The wind feels like winter, from what Dawn can tell. And it’s coming on pretty damn fast.

Alex gets back down to the campsite first. Brandon and Evan are hot on his trail. By the time Dawn comes out from the gully, she can see the three guys closing in on Christian’s tent.

Behind her, the slope looks almost vertical from here. The peak of the Raven’s Claw looks a mile high. Dawn can’t even make out the summit; the whole side of the mountain just looks like sheer rock.